James Krohe Jr. Remember the news, announced by District 186 in March, that 68 of Springfield’s 1,329 public school teachers did not have the required paperwork in their personnel files showing them to be fit for the classroom? This except from A New Guide for Emigrants to the West, written by the American Baptist missionary John Mason Peck in 1836: A material defect in all the la...

A year ago I ventured an opinion about one of the chronic ailments suffered by U.S. health care -- expensive, ineffectual or unnecessary treatments that are partly a result of incentives built into our perverse system of paying for such things. (See Just what the doctor ordered, August 23,2012.) On August 19 Tyler Cowen pointed to a study by the Government Accountability Office that found ...

There is a new stone bench on the UIS campus dedicated to the late Rich Shereikis, a founding faculty member of UIS’s predecessor school and a long-time contributor to IT. (See “The right combination of sensibilities,” April 11, 2013.) The bench adorns the berm where West Lake Drive meets the campus ring road. The spot, which will eventually be dedicated to all the Founding Faculty at UI...

If you enjoy the grisly autopsy scenes in your favorite cop drama, you might like to poke about a bitin the corpse of the City of Detroyt, as I did in Dancing around the issue from the Aug. 8, 2013 paper. Since that piece appeared, J. Eric Wise added to the discussion in this City Journal essay....

My piece about whether collegiate athletes ought to be paid (see ”Throwing in the towel,” Aug. 1, 2013 was merely a course-summary version of a complex argument. Readers interested in learning more about that argument might find these interesting: “The Shame of College Sports” by Taylor Branch. Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2011 “College sports reform needed, but paying student-ath...

In “Short arm of the law” I addressed the failure of federal prosecutors to go after financial criminals with the same zeal they show in pursuing political insiders. “Why do not our protectors seek to return us to the day when businesspeople made and traded things rather than stealing what others made?” I asked. “The answer seems clear enough. Mobsters and terrorists and rogue c...

This morning Ezra Klein of the Washington Post adds more than two cents' worth to the not-quite debate about end-of-life medical decision-making. Klein discusses the legislation proposed by Oregon rep Earl Blumenauer that I described yesterday. The problem with Blumenauer’s legislation isn’t that it goes too far. It’s that it doesn’t go nearly far enough....We don’t discus...

Back on Sept 29, 2011, I asked in The college game whether college was always the only or the best way to prepare for a career. In Education Isn't the Same as Skills, Slate columnist Matt Ygesias warns that we shouldn't be so blithe about identifying formal education with skills, since it is possible for the economy to change in ways that simply start rewarding a different set of skills than t...